Huts58

Even for a rainy Saturday night The Horse and Barge was busier than a Billy Graham revivalist meeting on Glasgow Green. I must have glowed like a halogen lamp from within because a path to the bar miraculously appeared in front of me. The pub had been chewing up barmaids and spitting them out like no good sinners. The new barmaid Peggy had a supercilious smile that raised man above temptations and a moustache to match her walrus features. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but I tried to be Christian about it.

‘A pint of lager.’ I added ‘please,’ on at the end, whilst I counted through my change to pay for it.

Barry Ferguson winked at me. ‘I think she fancies you!’

I took a sup out of my pint, giving myself a bit of a matching moustache, and gave Barry the kind of wave Pope Paul VI would have been proud of.

I couldn’t find a seat and was jabbed with sharp elbows, almost trampled and excused-me that many times I’d have thought I was on a dance floor. I found sanctuary up against a pillar near the pool table. I briefly thought about putting a coin on the edges of the table to mark my spot for a game against the potential winner. But there were that many coins already down, that the pool table looked as if it would sink under the weight of its iron cladding.

I pulled out my fags and fingered the remaining coins in my pockets, counting them surreptitiously through the material. I pulled my hands guiltily away, hoping that no one had noticed. But when I looked up Maureen Hargreaves was looking straight at me. She was sitting jemmied in beside some fat friend I didn’t really know, and Sammy Doak.

The Walker Brother’s Make it Easy on Yourself came on the jukebox, as if by magic, setting the mood I was in. I raised my pint up into the air; a toast, to Maureen, to her and me, and all the things that could have been. She didn’t smile back, just looked and and looked away, as if I’d shat in her hand. I didn’t blame her. It was all Sammy Doak’s fault. If I hadn’t just been to confession I don’t know what I’d have done to him.

The doors to the pub burst open and in swaggered my dad and his red-faced cronies flush with the look of victory. I hid behind the pillar. There was a hush in the hullabaloo as my dad pulled out their winnings. First dad brought out a ten-pound note, the kind of money that only a bank manager, or robber, could make in a month. But when he pulled out the twenty-pound note, dad was Ringo Starr and football player rolled into one. People crowded in to shake his hand and touch him like some kind of living saint. But they were too shy to ask to see what a twenty pound note looked like.

I didn’t have long to wait. Dad, the erstwhile rock Starr, pushed through his well-wishers up towards me.

‘Here,’ Dad said, handing me a pint and slipping me a pound note discreetly in a handshake. I was almost tempted to ask not if the note was real, but if he was, but when he added, ‘don’t tell your mum,’ with his eyes squinting at me, I knew.

‘What happened?’ I asked, taking a drink out of my new pint and draining my old pint for old times sake.

‘We were up and the Dancing Granny’s and we didn’t seem to be able to lose. We lost the first one. But every single bet after that came up. It was unbelievable’. Dad pulled a wad of crumpled slips from his pocket, as if I didn’t believe him.

The Dancing Granny ran her bookmaker business from the living room of her house. She’d inherited the business know how from her dad. Some said he’d been poisoned by her voice, which was like a nail through your head, but everyone knew she was a woman that could be trusted to pay out. There was none of that, messing about. Bang. You got it off her, then and there. That made her very popular. And rich enough to have a car to chauffer herself to the dancing in the town centre. But she was never lucky there.

I didn’t put the pound note in my pocket. I was waiting for the right time to give Dad the pound back. Then I remembered that I’d actually been in chapel when he’d started winning. I supped my pint meditatively. Dad probably owed me more than that. But I didn’t want to chance my luck.

My luck changed when I spotted Gillian Ambrose sitting in the far corner with one of the boys I’d went to school with Charlie Porter. I was short sighted, but Charlie’s black NHS bottle specs were that thick that he had to put his head on your neck to look at your face and support their weight. Or, at least that was the way he looked when he was talking to Gillian. I wasn’t really that jealous, not at all, I’d been to confession and cleansed of all that kind of thing. Charlie, with his eyesight, probably thought that Gillian was good looking. I felt sorry for him.

But as I swallowed a couple more pints I noticed Gillian looking over and mocking me. She’d led me on. Then she’d let me down. And now she was ignoring me. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Then somebody else put Make it Easy on Yourself on the jukebox again, and knew they could goin’ take a good fuck to themselves as well.

I caught Gillian when she was up going to the toilet.

‘What are you doin’ ignoring me?’ I said blankly, stepping in front of her, so that even Charlie Porter wouldn’t have failed to see me.

But Gillian just smiled, all funny scarves and Petula oil, like a hippy wraith, that slipped around me. ‘Just a sec,’ she said in her Brummie accent.

I waited, as patiently as I could. She was always, going, disappearing into toilets. I wondered if it was some kind of fetish thing, or if she’d a weak bladder, but that made me need the toilet too. When I came back she was sitting back snug in the corner with Charlie Porter.

I looked over at Gillian and Charlie, smoking and drinking each other up and hee-hawing as if they were having the best time in the world and I was stuck outside, looking in. Gillian turned and smiled, so that she was almost pretty. She waved at me, to come over, a semaphore signal, all arms, that half the pub and even Charlie couldn’t have missed. And I should have been grateful.

Maureen Hargreaves tapped me on the back of the elbow. ‘Hi,’ Maureen said, so quietly, I almost had to lip read, as she clutched her bag as if it was going to escape her, standing so still in front of me, her long unbound hair glinting fairy tale gold, and addressing me like a stranger, so that I had to behave like one.

‘Hi,’ I said back, trying desperately to think of something to say, which was not about football, not about anything, not about the adult us, looking through and over the blush of her pretty face, that somehow suited her, at Sammy Doak, who watched me and her like a fox in the hen house.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I finally said, breaking away from Maureen, leaving her standing alone in the crowd, as I pushed my way over to where Gillian Ambrose and Charlie Porter were sitting.